Month: August 2016

I just wanted to share a bit of my evolving process, in this case real estate for EvE: The will to live. Here are some of the houses I have created for the scenes. They are somewhat lo poly, for those who don’t know, it means the underlying geometry is quite simple, which can reduces rendering time, (producing final images easier).

However, I have some scenes coming up with landscape type views, and so I need to fill up the background. The problem is my houses are not just one piece, and that makes spreading many of them around a scene not so easy, and also, it increases the rendering time. I came up with a quick method for creating them, and here are the first ones.

This last pic shows the diffuse texture map. I won’t say it was a total cinch to make them, as I wanted not to just whip them up but devise my own work method, so that it becomes easier. I will share that in another post, but basically it is just using a cube, extruding and dividing the top face for the roof, using a mirror modifier and painting most of it in Blender. The doors I added in photoshop. The textures are from my own photographs, from textures.com and from the very nice brush pack from Blender Sensei.

Some of the bricks don’t match at the corners but that’s not a problem as these will be scattered in the background. I almost made roofs only but sections of wall can still be seen. Here are some test images of that background population. I was able to easily distribute them across the landscape with a great add-on from AFX labs called Group Clusters. It saves tons of time when spreading a group of models and can stick them nicely to the surface, as you can see.

These pics were super fast to render, but I also noticed I need some variation in the roofing colors. To that end I cracked open my Quixel Suite, because I have used and reused all my roofing textures and need a way to get more variety quickly. Remember, it’s just me making everything (almost: 97.47%) for the film so I have to be pragmatic, finding shortcuts wherever I can. Note: I have made over 70 buildings, more than 50 zombies, (all rigged, with facial expressions), and I don’t know how many cups of coffee to get me this far…. plus bricks, guard rails, boxes, cookies, candles, pencils, etc. etc. etc.

So that’s my post on lo poly houses: I wouldn’t want to live in one, but they sure fill up a background nicely.